I travel a lot, and these sunglasses are perfect spares. I hate being in a sunny place and not having sunglasses. It is wonderful having a couple back-ups in case one breaks. First things first: As sunglasses, they're your typical sunglasses. They work. They keep out the sun. They look good (not great, just good). They're definitely worth more than $5 each. So, my story with these: Almost exactly a year ago, I bought a pair of three of these, and since then I’ve brought them to 7 countries, Zanzibar, and a frozen Soviet conflict zone, in addition to general daily use where I live. I always used them as a backup pair, since my nice, regular, expensive ones kept being spontaneously destroyed. I also didn’t ever put them in cases, because they were backups. Despite the awful, awful things I did to these backup sunglasses, it took almost exactly one year to destroy all of them. The first one fell into the toilet of a Lebanese restaurant in Armenia after about two months, another got lost somewhere in Zanzibar after about 7 months, the third was crushed by a watermelon on a mountain (but somehow didn’t break), and they all survived being dropped on hard/dirty/weird surfaces at some point during their torturous lifespan. I finally wrecked the last one today - I was chatting with a cop at the Verizon store, while waiting for data to transfer to my new phone, and the hinge finally just gave out and one of the temples (things that go to your ear) simply fell off, never to be re-attached. That wasn’t surprising, since the hinge was damaged due to a watermelon falling on that particular pair about 10 months ago. The first thing I did when I got home was download some songs from iTunes, and the second thing I did was buy another set of these off Amazon. These things aren't titanium and they're definitely not super-durable, but I was surprised what they could survive (given the price), and how long it took me to destroy all of them. Plus, they’re typical quality and look just fine. Five stars.
